Decline, Fall, and Aftermath of the Qing Empire 113
that the Manchus had in effect betrayed China by giving in to Western
demands in order to preserve their own power. Many young Chinese
began to study in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, while
Sun Yat-sen and others agitated for the overthrow of Qing rule. The
court promised the adoption of a constitutional monarchy (basically
what Kang Youwei had proposed in 1898), but as provincial assemblies
were set up after 1908, they became centers of opposition to, rather
than support for, the Qing imperial system.
Sun Yat-sen was a charismatic visionary from Guangzhou who
went to Hawaii at age thirteen to live with his brother. He became a
Christian, attended a British medical school in Hong Kong, and prac-
ticed medicine briefl y in Macao. But his true calling was politics, and
his great desire was to save his country. After the Sino-Japanese War,
he decided the only hope for China was to overthrow the Qing dynasty
and replace it with a democratic republic. In 1895, Sun and several
friends were discovered plotting an armed uprising in Guangzhou, and
he escaped to Japan. He cut off his queue, grew a mustache (then the
popular style in Japan), adopted a Japanese name, Nakayama (Zhong-
shan, or “Central Mountain,” in Chinese), and started wearing Western
clothes. He attracted a following among Chinese students in Japan and
inspired audiences with his vision of a modern democratic China. He
called for three principles of the people: racialism, meaning China for
the Chinese and not the Manchus or foreigners; democracy, or people’s
rights; and socialism, or people’s livelihood. To answer the argument
that China was not ready for democracy, Sun suggested a transition
period of “tutelage” during which military rulers would gradually turn
over power to an elected civilian government.
Sun’s career was almost ended in 1896 when he was seized and held
in the Qing embassy in London when offi cials there recognized him
as a revolutionary. Fortunately for Sun, his British friends successfully
lobbied the British government to pressure the embassy to release him.
Thereafter, Sun stayed safely out of China and raised money for his
revolutionary cause among overseas Chinese communities around the
world. He plotted many uprisings against the Qing government in the
fi rst decade of the twentieth century, and some of his co-conspirators
were caught and executed.
One of the most impressive of the anti-Manchu revolutionaries was
a woman, Qiu Jin. When her merchant husband wanted to take a con-
cubine in 1904, she left him in disgust, sent their two children to her
parents, and sold the jewelry in her dowry to fi nance a trip to Japan to
study. She dressed like a man, carried a sword, and wrote fi ery calls for